Wednesday, September 26, 2001

It’s a government for big businesses
Commentary by Chris Dobson

Earlier this year in South Dallas those citizens living in the Emanuel Apartment complex were left with only one source of drinkable water thanks to the management of the complex. Scenes appeared on the nightly news of girls and boys, men and women carrying buckets of water back to their apartments from a spigot located at the edge of the apartment complex.

If this is the success of capitalism and free market principles then we can only imagine what living conditions might be like in fifty years if left to the “market.”

A country that can provide for the basics of civilization, water, food, housing and education, but refuses to do so, is not a success story for free market ideology, but a corrupt regime interested in profits before people. It amazes me that in the richest country in the world we have yet to find a way to end starvation and malnutrition within our borders, much less the rest of the world, yet we can create a biosphere miles above the earth known as the International Space Station.

Perhaps this is why there is such distress among leaders of corporations and states who require, in our very own country, 10-foot fences stretching for miles around meetings of the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. In our country where citizens are the repository of sovereignty and have a right to assembly and redress of grievances it seems a bit askew for our federal government, as well as state and local police, to actively prevent these simple democratic occurrences. What do these “anti-globalization” protesters want? I cannot speak for all but I surmise that they would like some say in the process.

“Globalization” is not a magical process, as media corporations would like us to believe; it describes the growing integration of economies worldwide, which could take place using thousands of different methods with thousands of different goals.

This particular form of “globalization” has led to a decline in real wages directly correlating to a growth in profit for owners and speculators. These profits could be used to increase workers’ salaries but then they are no longer profits but costs.

Instead, these profits have created the most disproportionate distribution of wealth in America since the Roaring ‘20s, which was quickly followed by the great depression.

We as humans, not workers or consumers, are protected by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drafted by the United Nations and ratified by the United States in 1948.

This declares: “Everyone who works has the right to just and favorable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection ... Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.”

In America, the common view of unions is of a corrupt and self-enriching aristocracy stealing from the working-class man and the diligent corporate executive. In the real world, unions offer collective bargaining to help even out the inequality between owners and workers. If one steelworker walks into the corporate offices and demands a raise, he’s summarily dismissed. If the union demands a raise, then in effect all workers have walked into the office.

Over the past two centuries, thousands of Americans have died doing precisely that, demanding better conditions and wages to insure, as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights promises, an existence worthy of human dignity. Worker’s wages increased almost as fast as inflation, and if minimum wage was tied to the Dow Jones throughout the nineties we could expect minimum wages approaching $20 an hour.

But as more and more business students internalize the Machiavellian nature of contemporary business practices, the light of an equitable and fair society ensuring all the basics of health care, food, housing, is slowly fading. A decade ago George Bush created a health care plan approximately five times the size of the current health care plan. Instead of insuring the health of people, the current administration is interested in insuring the financial solubility of American corporations.

What can one say about a government that finds $15 billion for the airlines, despite layoffs, and billions of dollars for military action, yet is hard-pressed to find money for Social Security, universal health care for all Americans and food for the starving people worldwide? My only thought is that government is no longer of, for and by the people; instead it is of, for and by corporations and their owners.

Chris Dobson is a senior political science major from Arlington. He can be contacted at (c.p.dobson@student.tcu.edu).